A new sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic Fengjiahe Formation of Dali of Yunnan Province, China
Data files
Mar 26, 2026 version files 91.89 KB
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README.md
1.68 KB
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Supplementary_dataset.tnt
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Abstract
Early-diverging sauropodomorph dinosaurs are abundant in the Lower Jurassic Lufeng Formation of Lufeng area of Yunnan Province, southwestern China. However, the fossil records of this group remain relatively scarce in other regions of China. Here we describe a new sauropodomorph, Xiangyunloong fengming gen. et sp. nov., based on recently collected material from the Lower Jurassic Fengjiahe Formation of Xiangyun County of Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan Province, which is about 200 km west to the Lufeng dinosaur fossil sites. Xiangyunloong can be diagnosed by several unique features such as lateral expansion developed at the middle region of the dorsal end of cervical neural spines, heightened hyposphene of dorsal vertebrae, and ilium with anteroposteriorly reduced but laterally and ventrally flaring supracetabular crest. Phylogenetic analysis recovers Xiangyunloong at a position between Massospondylidae and Sauropodiformes and within an unresolved clade together with Xingxiulong chengi and Xingxiulong yueorum. Nonetheless, Xiangyunloong exhibits significant morphological distinctions from Xingxiulong and other early-diverging sauropodomorphs, supporting its designation as a new genus. The discovery of Xiangyunloong not only further expands the known taxonomic composition of Early Jurassic sauropodomorphs in southwestern China, but also enhances our understanding of the diversity, distribution, and evolutionary history of this group.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.vdncjsz8k
Description of the data and file structure
File: Supplementary_dataset.tnt
Description: This dataset comprises 82 taxa (including mostly early-diverging sauropodomorphs and some outgroups) and 398 characters. It contains the codings of the new specimen, which is used for the phylogenetic analysis in this paper. The dataset can be conducted in TNT 1.5 (Goloboff and Catalano, 2016) using the following procedures: (1) Import the .tnt file in TNT 1.5. (2) The maximum number of trees is set at 10000. (3) Choose the Traditional search; the number of replicates is set at 1000, and the number of trees to save per replication is set to 10. (4) Click "Search" to run the analysis.
References:
Goloboff PA, Catalano SA. 2016. TNT version 1.5, including a full implementation of phylogenetic morphometrics. Cladistics 32, 221–238. doi:10.1111/cla.12160.
Access information
Data was derived from the following source, with the addition of the new specimen described in this paper.
Wang Y-M, Zhang Q-N, Wang Y-C, Xu H, Chen J, Feng Z, Xu X, Wang T, You H-L. 2025. A new Early Jurassic dinosaur represents the earliest-diverging and oldest sauropodomorph of East Asia. Scientific Reports 15, 26749. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-12185-2.
Code/software
TNT software is needed to review and analyze the dataset, which is available at https://cladistics.org/tnt/. The standard text editor is also available to review the dataset.
